Not many races earn the hyperbolic adjective ‘epic’ but stage 15 of the 2024 Vuelta a España was a truly epic day of racing. It had all the ingredients to make a thriller: relatively short, a heck of a lot of climbing, a violent summit finish, and it being a Sunday during a Grand Tour. Add to the pot a winner from an underdog team, and you have a blockbuster stage, one that belongs to 23-year-old Spaniard Pablo Castrillo (Kern Pharma), his second win of the Vuelta.
On a day that was expected to scramble the GC top 10, there were only minimal changes in the standings, at least as far as the order is concerned. That said, though Ben O’Connor (Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale) takes the race lead into the final rest day, his advantage over Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) is now just a minute and three seconds – after the Slovenian picked up a 20-second penalty – and Enric Mas (Movistar) holds firm in third after out-climbing all his GC rivals on the Cuitu Negru.
How it happened
- Stage 15 would be one of the biggest challenges of the Vuelta with 3,804 metres of elevation gain squeezed into 143 km. There were four classified climbs on the cards, including twice up the Alto de la Colladiella (6.5km at 8%), but the tough Cat.1 climb would be merely an appetiser for the Cuitu Negru which would stage the finale, an 18.9-kilometre HC mountain test whose 7.1% average gradient is utterly misleading: far from steady or consistent and with a real sting in the tail, its last 3 km averaging 13% with ramps of up to 24%.
- There was always a good chance it would be a GC day, but the breakaway was still a hot ticket, both for the chancers and super-domestiques seeking to play launchpad for their leaders in the pack. With that in mind, the first 50 km were chaotic as a number of different groups found time. At one point, shortly after the first Cat.1 climb, the confusion and fatigue was such that even Enric Mas got himself off the front, but it all settled down just a few kilometres later as a group of 17 broke clear, UAE Team Emirates instrumental in making it happen.
- The breakaway swelled to 21 at about the halfway point, and there was a handful of teams with numbers, including three for UAE Team Emirates who’d got Pavel Sivakov into the move – his eyes on moving up the GC – along with two each for Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale, Red Bull-Bora-Hansrgohe, Groupama-FDJ, and George Bennett also had two teammates on hand.
- One team that had missed out on the breakaway was T-Rex-QuickStep, and once the peloton had reformed somewhat after the chaotic start, they took control of the gap.
- Not wanting to burn through too many matches too soon, QuickStep let the gap increase to about three minutes on the second ascent of the Cat.1 Alto de la Colladiella, then flung themselves down the descent and onto the valley roads where they could attempt to bring it down again.
- As it happened, the duo of Vine and Sivakov versus QuickStep’s James Knox and Louis Vervaeke on the front of the peloton appeared fairly evenly matched on the run-in to the climb, the gap stuck between 2:45 and three minutes.
- At the foot of the Cuitu Negru, the leaders still held a little over three minutes on the peloton, but while the breakaway was continuing to shed bodies, the peloton was still led by T-Rex-QuickStep, with an occasional token pull from one of the other GC teams. All biding their time for what was sure to be a dramatic finish.
- By 15 km to go, about four kilometres into the climb, Sivakov was the lone UAE rider but was still the only man working in the move that was down to three, Vlasov and Castrillo sitting on, as meanwhile, three minutes further down the mountain, Landa’s domestiques were steadily thinning out the bunch.
- QuickStep was finally down to their last domestique with about 8 km remaining, O’Connor shadowing the home favourite as the gap fell to 2:30. Besides Landa, Roglič was the only GC rider with a teammate left in the group, not forgetting Vlasov’s presence up ahead where Sivakov was still setting the pace.
- Landa was forced into the spotlight about 6 km from the summit when Mattia Cattaneo swung off, but a few-hundred metres of skirmishing yielded nothing and the GC group descended into a game of cat and mouse, the gap trickling beneath two minutes.
- As the breakaway entered the last three kilometres – the hardest section of the climb by far – with two minutes still in hand, the stage victory was back in the picture given the red jersey group’s stalling behind.
- Having looked like he was in trouble earlier in the climb, Castrillo made a huge injection of pace as the grade ramped up, and Sivakov and Vlasov seemed unwilling, or unable, to respond as he opened up several seconds’ advantage on the steep ramps.
- When the red jersey group hit the same corner with Florian Lipowitz on the front, all the signs were there for a Roglič attack, and it came two kilometres from the top once Lipowitz had ripped a hole in the group. Roglič ate into the climb, but his gap wasn’t significant – it was not over yet …
- Up ahead, Castrillo was briefly joined by Vlasov who’d left Sivakov behind, but on the violently steep gradients, neither was able to do much more than try and stay upright.
- It seemed impossible that Castrillo could do any more, but he was able to put in one last desperate acceleration, and finally it was done. He climbed into the mist and crossed the line alone for his second victory of the Vuelta.
- Deep in the fog behind them, Roglič had been unable to open a significant gap as the scattered GC group laboured up the steep gradients, and he was joined by Mas just before the flamme rouge, the red jersey at that point only about 15 seconds in arrears.
- Mas opened up a bike length or two on Roglič in the last few hundred metres, but the Slovenian managed to close the gap so that their time was the same on the line, which they crossed in fourth and fifth.
- GC contenders continued to emerge from the fog in dribs and drabs until O’Connor crossed the line for 11th on the stage, losing 38 seconds to Roglič and Mas.
- However, Roglič would later see his gains shrink and his gap to red amended to 1:03 after the jury handed him a 20-second time penalty for drafting behind a team car while chasing back after a bike swap – a pre-planned switch to a one-by setup equipped for the horrendous gradients of the final climb.
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Quote of the day
I guess I’ve proven those people wrong who thought I’d lose the jersey. I had a pretty good day. It’s a bit of a shame that I exploded a bit at the end but that’s got to be probably one of the most horrible endings to a climb I’ve ever done. It was really disgusting … It was kind of only one attack, and that was Primož, who was super impressive. Then it was very much man against man. You just felt like you were going nowhere, and you couldn’t see anything with the fog as well. It was rough.”
O’Connor said post-stage, happy to have defended his lead.
Brief analysis
- UAE Team Emirates roared into stage 15 with a clear plan, but by halfway up the penultimate climb, it began to look shaky. Soler and Vine had both pulled the pin by the final climb, leaving Pavel Sivakov to do all the work on the front of the break, with no hope of help from his companions – one biding his time with his team leader back in the peloton, and Castrillo unwilling to tow along such strong rivals. It was an unfortunate situation for Sivakov who had pretty much been painted into a corner by his own team tactics, forcing him to do an enormous amount of work along with Vine before the brutal final climb, and then alone almost all the way to the top, while the rest of the GC hopefuls were getting an armchair ride in the bunch. In the end, he did gain some time on GC by finishing 33 seconds ahead of Mas and Roglič, but it was a huge bill for slender reward. He’ll be thanking his lucky stars there’s a rest day between him and the vicious mountains of stage 16.
Up next
Immediately after the rest day, the Vuelta peloton will have to get right back into climbing mode with a stage that ends at the beautiful – but brutal – Lagos de Covadonga in Asturias. It is an irregular climb with several pitches that could spur attacks in the finale. Past Vueltas a España have been won and lost on these gradients
Originally appeared in our Vuelta stage-by-stage preview.
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